The sun was about halfway to the horizon when Lucienne flung the doors to the Fleeting Leaves’ home open and marched in. “Sari, Ari, I’m back! Did you miss me?” she called into the seemingly empty house.

But it was only just “seemingly” because after a while, thumping sounds came from the stairs and two little figures rounded the corner. Lucienne had to step back to prevent Sariel and Ariel hurting themselves on her armor. “Oof. Well, aren’t you two energetic.”

“Welcome back!” 

“Haha, thank you. Were you nice to Marion?” she asked as she allowed herself to be pulled by the two kids into the house. 

Behind her, the rest of the Fleeting Leaves arrived at the doorsteps with Eva shaking her head. “Sheesh. You’d think that it’s been years since they’ve seen each other from that reaction.”

“Isn’t that okay? Makes the place more lively,” Celaen said as she pulled her quiver from her shoulders. She looked at the meager number of arrows remaining and sighed. “I’ll have to make more. This is why I hate fighting those turtle types.”

“Just aim for the soft spots.”

“…Easy for you to say,” Celaen muttered, glaring at Duura. “Your magic can just cook them inside out.”

Duura just grinned in response.

One by one, they filed into the house, marking an end to a week-long excursion, as well as the end of the first time that Lucienne was separated from her precious twins for longer than a few days. Now, she sat in front of the two girls in the twins’ bedroom on the floor.

“Okay, now hand over your work,” she said.

“Marion already saw it!” Sariel protested.

However, Ariel just went and dug in her school bag and pulled out a few sheets of paper before laying them out in front of Lucienne. Lucienne nodded in approval at the circled scores before turning her gaze at Sariel.

With great reluctance, Sariel crawled over to her bags and pulled out her schoolwork. Lucienne looked at the scores and then patted Sariel’s shoulder. “Don’t worry too much about it,” she said. “Even if your scores are not good, it just means that you have to work a little harder.”

She didn’t want to put too much pressure on them. Going to school was merely to open up more options for them in the future, but if Sariel really wasn’t suited to an academic lifestyle, Lucienne didn’t mind changing her focus to something more practical and hands-on.

However…the nature of the twins’ mana made things a bit difficult to work with.

“Did you do the magic exercises I assigned?” she asked the two of them, and this time they both nodded without any hesitation. Compared to schoolwork, magic was more up their alley, and soon, a sphere of golden magic floated above the cupped hands of each of the two girls.

“Step one… good. Now onto step two,” Lucienne said.

The single large spheres broke up into smaller ones of different sizes, with one large sphere in the middle and five smaller ones hovering around it. As the twins did the exercises, Ariel scrunched her eyebrows in concentration while Sariel barely seemed to be putting in any effort.

Seeing the apparent difference in talent, Lucienne couldn’t help but sigh to herself again.

“Step three now,” she said, and the girls went to work immediately to demonstrate their progress.

After breaking up the large single sphere into many smaller ones, the girls then began to make the little spheres orbit the big one in different paths.

The three step exercise was a simple way to practice magic control, where step one was the most basic act of manifesting mana externally. The second step was shaping the mana by breaking it up into smaller pieces of different sizes, which was more difficult than making them all equally big. Finally, the third step was control; moving the manifested mana as the caster wished was an essential skill to using any magic.

As Lucienne watched how smoothly the spheres on Sariel’s hands circled, almost as if they were dancing, she almost could not bear to switch over to Ariel, whose spheres moved stiffly in little straight lines before abruptly changing directions as Ariel compensated.

Once again, the difference in talent was quite clear. It wasn’t that Ariel was worse, but because Ariel’s talents were in different fields compared to Sariel. Between the two, Lucienne considered Ariel much closer to herself, being more suited to become a templar than an archpriest.

However, since she was no longer part of the Church, it would be strange to call them templars and archpriests, so… what was Ariel, exactly? And what was Sariel?

Lucienne laughed to herself at the irony of the twins’ talents—little shy Ariel was more suited to fighting up close while the fiery Sariel was more suited to bombarding with spells from afar. However, Ariel was the bigger academic, while the field of magic that required more knowledge went to Sariel who had worse grades.

Fate was strange indeed.

“Alright,” she said, clapping her hands to mark the end of the exercise. “Good work. Continue working on it, Ari. Even if it’s difficult, it’s still the basics and if you have the fundamentals down, everything will be easier in the future. Don’t be sad because Sariel is better.”

Ariel nodded earnestly. As far as Lucienne can tell, she wasn’t affected much by Sariel’s performance, which was good. The last thing Lucienne wanted was for Ariel to be discouraged.

“And Sar, don’t be too proud that you can do things more easily than Ari. Everyone is different, and while I can still teach Ari for a long time, I’ll be much less able to teach you, so you’ll have to learn many things by yourself. To do that, you have to get your grades up!”

“Okayyy fiiine,” Sariel muttered, stretching out her words, looking downcast at the mention of her grades. Lucienne ruffled her hair again with a chuckle, leaving Sariel glaring at her.

 

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

 

The days passed relatively peacefully, or at least as quietly as someone with a profession involved in violence could be. For the next extended commission that took the party far from Dianene, it was Marion that went in Lucienne’s place while Lucienne stayed home to look after the twins.

Just when Lucienne thought that they had a nice rotation going, after only one such rotation, some newcomers to the city arrived. As she passed by the city’s hospital on her way home from the market, she felt the presence of holy magic, causing her to stop in surprise.

“Holy magic… If I remember correctly, they’re quite rare and most are snatched up by other parties,” she muttered to herself. Holding her groceries, she decided to check out the presence, curious about what kind of person those rare holy magic users were, and what race they were.

She had no idea what she was expecting, but a few of the more common races present in the city crossed her mind: elf, dwarf, orc… and even a lion beastman thanks to having traveled with Elyss. One last choice also appeared among the rest, but she quickly dismissed it.

“Human… no way, right?”

Whoever the mage was, they were working in the hospital, because after the magic faded, the person moved a little distance and cast the magic again— they were moving from person to person. The person was skilled, too— more much so than she was.

Anticipation filled her as her heart began to thump faster with excitement.

After nodding to the receptionist, Lucienne walked past him and entered the hospital itself, heading straight for the staircase. First floor… second floor… Exiting the stairwell, she made a beeline toward the room that contained the mana.

At the same time, she let out a bit of her own magic to let the person know of her existence.

Just as she reached the closed door and her hand reached for the doorknob, the handle turned by itself and the door was pulled open. A small head well below her eye level peeked out and Lucienne’s eyes widened as the face filled her with a sense of familiarity.

She had seen the little girl before, somewhere. More importantly, the little girl was human; the rounded ears proved as much.

“You—” she began, but before she could continue, another girl’s voice sounded from inside the room.

“Fleur? What’s the matter?” A moment later, the source of the voice appeared in front of Lucienne—another vaguely familiar face. Apparently, that second little girl recognized her as well, because her mouth fell open. “You’re that missing templar!”

“Missing templar… you’re from Moltrost?” Lucienne asked, quickly searching her memories for the two girls’ faces. She found it without much trouble now that she had some more clues, and she stepped back, pointing at them. “You’re those acolytes! Fleur… and Anne… You know Camilla, don’t you?” 

At the mention of Camilla’s name, the first girl’s eyes lit up. “I knew it! You really did go with Camilla! I told you so, Anne!” she gloated, then as if remembering something, Fleur turned back to Lucienne. “Wait, do you know where she is? We’re looking for her!”

During their brief exchange, the holy magic never stopped, so it obviously that the mage Lucienne had detected wasn’t either of the two girls standing in front of her, and now at last the holy magic faded. A man a little shorter than her stepped out behind the girls.

This time, Lucienne recognized him at first sight. How could she not, when he was such a high profile person in the Church? “Justin! You’re here too?”

Having heard their conversation while inside, Justin didn’t look too surprised upon seeing her and he nodded. “I came here with Fleur and Anne since things changed back home. We’re looking for Camilla; do you know where she is?” he asked, repeating the same question as Fleur from before.

With the same questions coming of two separate peoples’ mouths one after the other, Lucienne would have to be dumb to not assume it’s something of importance. “I’ll tell you, but don’t you have some healing to do?” she asked.

Having just arrived in Dianene, as far as Lucienne could tell, Justin was probably broke and was currently temporarily working as a healer in the hospital. Sometimes Lucienne took the same commissions since it was right in the city and paid a lot.

With her reminder, Justin scowled and looked at a clipboard he was holding in his hands that showed a list of patients. Crossing one row off the sheet, he moved on to the next one. As he passed, he nodded to Fleur and Anne.

“They know just as much as me and they don’t have anything to do right now. If you’ll talk with them…”

“Gladly.”

Satisfied, Justin walked off toward his next patient while Lucienne stared back at the two pairs of eyes looking up at her.

The next words that came out of Fleur’s mouth, as blunt as can be, shook Lucienne to her very core.

“Moltrost is no more.”